Unlock Your Brain's Potential: The Surprising Truth About Neurofeedback with Dr. Andrew Hill

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friend click there and you'll be brought to a page with your referral code happy sharing foreign wild Health world for some reason the uh the adults are gone right now and they left Carl Seeger um to do some do some podcasting which I don't I don't know what Mike Stone was thinking there uh he maybe wasn't thinking at all but we're and even more so we have Ed Gilman here who is also one of the uh probably delinquent children of wild Health Ed's a vice president of wild hell at Wild health who focuses on advancing Health Care data and Science in increasing Precision medicine accessibility and Ed is a more recently adding uh generative AI tools into the mix which is kind of where a lot of healthcare may be kind of heading towards but so Ed holds a masters of information and data science from UC Berkeley and his interest includes Behavioral Science uh Health economics oh econometrics you're gonna have to talk to me about that unpack that for me and machine learning so Ed Gilman uh is here and then we also are really lucky to have Dr Andrew Hill who's a founding director and Lead neural therapist for the peak brain Institute and Dr Hill is one of the top uh Peak Performance coaches in the country and holds a PhD in cognitive neuroscience and from UCLA's Department of psychology and continues to do research on attention and cognition which uh I think we all know anybody who's listening to this podcast knows that's that's dear to dear to my heart if they've heard me talk to me all that maybe attention is a is a thing of mine that maybe I don't hold well but uh he does research methodology his research method Technologies include EEG quantitative EEG and then event related potential testing or Erp and is he's been practicing neurofeedback since 2003 which like you were cutting edge back then man and that's earlier yeah that's early buddy that's super early and then in addition to founding uh the peak brain Institute Dr Hill hosts his podcast the head first podcast um with Dr Hill and the lecture and he also lectures at UCLA teaching courses of psychology neuroscience and gerontology which is uh near and dear to our hearted at Wild health so so you two know each other uh so you guys go way back and I don't even know if I can say way back to Ed because Ed you whenever I talk to you I feel like you're two years old and so going way back is like in the womb or something like maybe a decade right yeah if I forget when Ed was my student at UCLA and then and then did some work with me uh at one of the companies we helped start um I forget when that was though it's all blur to me because I'm old in memory you know it kind of cute photos but yeah you guys well I mean first of all usually I start these podcasts and I let Mike Stone start these podcasts and he's like you know better I feel like I just read you guys's bios but I really wanted to start with like I want to do like the Good Morning Vietnam start you know like well let's not do that let's let's actually start with you guys talking about how you guys met and then Doctor Who if we could kind of just get kind of let's talk about where you guys met and then let's go back to what neural feedback is and and talk about principles of neuroplasticity and all that and then have you kind of go from there if that's okay sure so you mentioned that I'm a gerontologist which is like the study of Aging or the process of aging and I think uh Ed you were my student when you first hit UCLA right the Freshman cluster yeah so I taught I was a fellow teaching fellow in this year-long sequence UCLA has these freshman clusters where they bring in a cohort of freshmen and keep them together for the whole year through several classes doing uh building deeper knowledge in certain areas and then doing Capstone projects so they end up with you know a specific area of Mastery in a course area as well as with sort of between 200 and about 30 little friends that they sort of make over the rest of their college experience so Ed came in I was in my what was the course psychology of Aging or intro to aging or something gerontology course and uh and then I did a focus cluster group a little smaller group in the spring I think you were in that too right were you in my class yeah so I did a private little like you know grad student teaching the undergrads uh we had project-based work and and uh did a few other things in smaller groups so um and then after that I after my PhD from UCLA I ended up opening up a sort of biohacking style companies and the first one had a mixed addiction and non-addiction folks a wellness General and an addiction Focus that was really all about this path of agency this path of taking control of your brain and the addiction side of it which I wasn't deeply into I wasn't the expert in the alcohol and drug stuff but the people that were in that landscape were actually in a moderation landscape not an abstinence landscape largely which is very very you know attention getting in in alcohol certainly and we grew the neurofeedback side of the company is so separately and we served all the needs of the folks in the addiction side and the uh neurofeedback or brain training side of the company kind of outgrew the other half of the company over the next two three years and we split off into what's called Peak brain now and we're that was seven and a half years ago the peak brain started so uh we've been doing this brain training thing ever since and I think we set that off to you know run a letter of wreck or something and set them off to because he was our intern at the uh Alternatives was the name of the company we didn't pay you because I I that that was something that um I wasn't the controlling partner of that company so so you can't blame me perhaps but uh or you're well you're welcome both I mean I mean I'm sure some days no I'm kidding uh so um yeah well first of all I I guess I'd just like to hear like I have my concept of what neural feedback is um but I I'd like to hear like you know you're the expert man like I definitely like to hear that and and how does that relate to brain activity and how dangerous is like neuroplasticity yeah for sure so neurofeedbacks was that it probably not yeah couldn't have been that dangerous if Ed was involved right no no nerve feedback is Rel is is a pretty is a pretty straightforward process it's mysterious only because people are unique you know like personal training is mysterious too because everyone responds a bit differently and you have to pay attention you have to look at their individual data you have to iterate there's not a through line for someone's goals and personal training when they walk in that you know necessarily ahead of time it's more like okay these goals ah this these lipids okay here's some strategies with your metabolism to hack yourself in the right direction and in the brain stuff neurofeedback has been used mostly for the past 60 years 50 60 years by therapists in a therapeutic context it was discovered in the late 60s at UCLA actually this style of neurofeedback that most of the field does and it was discovered on cats you know cats are pretty bad instruction followers it's not really a voluntary process it's it's involuntary operant conditioning or shaping of the brain most forms of neurofeedback are like that so what you'll do is you'll stick a wire or two to the head and measure the brain as it changes moment to moment on its own and whenever it happens to change a little more in the direction you would like to exercise you applaud the brain you plot that change that parameter with auditory visual typically and so the brain's hearing oh good job bran good job brain good job brain nope good job good job good job nope for certain runs of brain waves it engages in every so often and it starts to notice hey wait a minute oh dropping my Alpha is doing something okay cool and it starts to lean into that it's almost all involuntary though because you can't feel your brain waves so it's this shaping or operant conditioning but of an involuntary Behavior the brain itself has no sensory nerve endings you can't feel your brain ironically it's doing all the feeling but it can't feel uh it's which is probably good because the brain is actually fairly active you know we think of the heart as a moving organ the brain also is a moving organ it actually physically pulses a little bit and has all kinds of acids and electricity and bursting Bits And if you could feel it you'd be miserable as my guess so we were designed so we can't actually have any sensation of it but that means you sort of bypass I mean neurofeedback is a form of biofeedback but that conjures the idea of like voluntary relaxation and paying attention to your heartbeat or something else voluntarily and that is a foreign that Loop of attending to the stimulus that's not normally uh perceptible in a way that lets you then train it or shape the stimulus like your heart rate variability or galvanic skin response or hand warming it's biofeedback but central nervous system everything inside of it is imperceptible in terms of direct experience you can't feel your brain waves firing the so that becomes this involuntary exercise so the classic neurofeedback on the field of it was developed around a brain wave called sensory motor rhythm if you've seen a cat in a windowsill that liquid body and laser-like focus is a super high SMR state so storm at UCLA was actually doing operant conditioning he was squirting chicken broth into the mouths of cats whenever they made more SMR a little burst of it and six months later the cats that have been conditioned ended up becoming seizure resistant to toxins so Andrew you might want to for our audience like some people aren't going to know what SMR is do you want to sure sure yeah yeah so SMR is a brain wave it's in the beta brain wave so beta is like in the teens smr's little rhythm that runs about 12 to 15 times per second and brain waves in general you can think of the brain the it's it's many layers the top layer the cortex or the bark is uh quite a large surface area all kind of wrinkled up against the top of the brain and you have what are called micro columns or sometimes mini columns these little clusters of cells about 30 000 neurons and maybe up to a hundred thousand glial cells or support cells that sit in this column this computational unit and that little group of cells will discharge it'll fire its electricity all at once and the whole little thirty thousand unit is kind of like a binary you know one or zero based on how it's firing or more accurately to rhythmically firing in a certain rate and then layers in that column will make connections to some local neighbors and some Far Away neighbors and then that creates information Flow by changing the brain waves in a column and many of the millions of columns we have so when a column is hanging out bouncing at 12 times per second and that's on the motor scrap that runs ear to ear that's a motorically calm State a physically relaxed State able to sit still to pump the brakes internally and not get reactive it's a high sensory motor Rhythm State SMR state or low beta State okay and cats do it naturally all the time this is why cats can fall asleep instantly too and then wake up it's it's SMR they're manipulating because SMR is also called sleep spindles by neurologists yeah same phenomena okay it's used in many ways but it's this little burst of beta waves it does things mostly it pumps the brakes you don't wake up when you hear a car go by or you don't go squirrel when something interesting happens so the calm cap in the window still watching Birds is literally the opposite of ADHD literally which is a low SMR and a high Theta state which is lubrication on the circuits so if you stick wires in the head on the areas involved in controlling Behavior you controlling your behavior voluntarily and you measure the SMR lobeta waves moment to moment and the Theta moment to moment and you applaud the brain whenever it shifts towards more beta and less Theta after several days of that the brain starts to move in that direction and then it creates changes in the resources and after five successions you feel it after two or three weeks you're getting movement after six or eight weeks you can actually measure the brain and see the differences you've been creating so it's just Progressive training process and sure oh yeah yeah of course you do yeah I guess I think maybe maybe what you're getting to there is is like let's talk about like what are the applications to that like where's the where's the like the actual applications and then also like at some point I'd like to hear your thoughts on what are the potential applications maybe coming on the Forefront in the end down the road sure thanks yeah um so the things that respond really well to neurofeedback are the gross features of our brain that you can see from the outside and also they're the things that all brains do and you can see from the outside gross features of anxiety executive function sleep speed of processing just through an EEG you can see so for instance there's a circuit in the front middle of the head whose job it is to help you decide what you're thinking about called the anterior cingulate it's one in the back of the posterior and they do jobs all the time when you're not forgetting what you're thinking about thank you and to your singular when you're going out walk the road watch the road thank you posterior cingulate you know I did its job wonderful these guys cramp up though and they cramp up into high gear they become little red blobs on a data read so I could put a cap on your head measure your brain at rest and say whoa you're uh cingulates are kind of active kind of cramped up a little bit and I wouldn't know if it was in the way for you but I would think it might be I would say you know what's plausible is that sometimes when the anterior cingulate cramps up people obsess a little bit they perseverate and get stuck in their head you know is that something you care about is it important to you is it real you know and then same thing with back midline when that's really activated somebody becomes perhaps kind of threat sensitive activated they ruminate but maybe it's a CEO and not OCD in the front maybe it's a lifeguard and not a PTSD or threat sensitivity in the back I think typically think of like amygdala and and for PTSD and that sort of activation there I don't think about what you're talking about can you is there like data around like hey you know like take take all comers you slap your your device on there and you say yeah that person has a history of of trauma PTSD or it has that sort of likely diagnosis and that person has OCD and we can look at that and then go back interview and like yes but the but the outliers in the brain are not as precise as the diagnostic language because they're actually probably more valid like front midline Theta is the thing that shows up in OCD in intrusive thought and Ticking and picking in claustrophobia and agoraphobia in all kinds of things but it can also be a natural variant and people are weird so you're seeing population metrics in a brain mapping situations you're saying hey here's some things that are outliers let's model them let's talk about the Neuroscience that is plausible oh wait three of these things matter to you okay I think when the ballpark are things you care about great right where you're going to see yeah so what's your weirdness is in a human if you do some sort of Imaging and not all of them are relevant yeah exactly people are very variable whether you do an fmri a respect or an x-ray or CT or anything you see huge variability brain mapping or quantitative EEG takes your resting brain and then does an age match population comparison so all the all the data you're looking at is in like bell curve type heat map sense so I can say to you and and the question you asked a minute ago Dr Seger the other diagnostically valid you know patterns not exactly is a short answer not really we call them phenotypes or Endo phenotypes more accurately and some of them rise to level of predictive like the ADHD phenotype uh monastero found in the 80s and 90s that the ratio of theta to Beta at the top of the head the vertex can blindly sort kids into ADHD and non-adhd buckets 94 accurately and if you see front midline Theta you know someone perseverates but they might not have OCD I don't maybe it's fine for you can I ask a question on that is yeah if that if we feel like it's that accurate why is this not become a diagnostic modality for ADHD as opposed to like the current modalities which is often like not then and I feel like well we don't diagnose it's gonna flog me but yeah we're sending home we're sending uh sending a application of like forms for teachers to fill out right um well what is a diagnosis it's not until until very recently the the DSM-5 you know the current versions are starting to put in information in the DSM the diagnostic criteria that include mechanism of the of the problem but up until very very recently nothing diagnostically has included the mechanism it's a collection of presentation of symptoms and you can have ADHD like symptoms from a concussion or from anxiety or from a thousand things and so the the diagnostic labels are actually less precise than the physiology so when you find someone's physiology and talk about it you can work backwards and say whoa okay like if someone has a high Theta beta ratio they're going to respond well to stimulants because that's what that's an ADHD brain but it still has tons of you know singulate beta and they're really tired from it because they're anxious and tired not sleeping and Spacey and someone says oh I think you have ADHD and you look at the brain you see all this activation that's where the utility goes it just sort of like flends you know the the wheat from the chaff and figure out where what's plausible what fits the presentation what makes sense and start to be mystified information so maybe it's it's like like all things it depends but it's it's you have population-based studies that this is what your testing modality looks like and then you pair that with the patient's symptoms and then you intervene to see if that you get changes in your brain waves and if that really in your performance performance yes yeah yeah because we always do executive function testing alongside a resting brain map brain Maps don't change day to day to day they're the same at a high level you look the same every day essentially compared to the average person your age your performance fluctuates a little bit day to day but if we snapshot your performance and find crazy ADHD or distractibility or fatigue or burnout and we see patterns in your brain that often go along with those exact things we're not doing science or medicine or sorry not doing medicine or psychology we're doing science we're doing cognitive Neuroscience putting physiology and behavior and contrast and seeing what sticks out but to teach someone about their goals and their resources not necessarily to apply a top level label so you know and and people are variable and what is a problem is often contextual I mean take something silly like you height you know if you're six foot seven that's unusual but it's great if you're on a basketball court it's not so good if you're trying to be a jockey it's a problem at that point you know like you'd have a contextual perspective on your data so when I'm pointing out your speed of processing compared to the average person your age or your tendency to get distracted your tendency to hyper Focus and I can describe it to you now you get to decide if it's important to you to change or maybe it's a great Quirk about yourself that you enjoy not everything we find is many things we find are not problematic there's a big persistence as you were saying with the uh with this response well to stimulants yes it doesn't that sounds to me like a great tool to throw into the mix as we're trying to figure out what's going to work for somebody and what's not it it should be yeah and usually is usually people are super excited to see it and Peak brain also has this open-ended access thing so we teach people to read their own brain mapping data and their own performance testing and then we provide unlimited access to the offices for regathering and we often do what's called neurofeedback and you know change their brain with them but even if they don't do neurofeedback they're mapping their brain every so often and looking at these changes building up from Hyperbaric medicine or psychologists or meditation or Psychotherapy or anything else they're doing or medication changes I can't tell you the number of contrast Maps I've done in California and New York at this point with caffeine cannabis Adderall and clean brain maps and looking at the four states somebody dials themselves into day to day and they have massive agency when they go whoa Adderall does make me super awake oh but my performance actually isn't any better and I'm starting to make commission errors oh oh yeah I am oh yeah maybe I'm taking too much Adderall but not me as a doctor saying you're Adderall might be in the way but hey here's your brain clean here's your brain with Adderall here's some performance differences that's a you know and then your brain maps are changing in this direction you would think it's all agency all exciting and usually people are just like blown away and happy to look at it and and you know very excited I also have folks where they say oh yeah I asked my kids psychiatrist if they want to look at this brain data you gathered and she got mad at me yeah because it was out of scope out of her expertise area and I have a I have a deal all our clients their doctors can come get their brains mapped I will do a cold read on you and tell you lots of things about yourself with zero information if you're a skeptic happy to you will not be a skeptic after that generally yeah but um no I've I every so often get a psychiatrist who gets like angry at neurofeedback and thinks it's a quackery thing and you know doesn't doesn't have the open mind to look at data well I mean I guess if we're talking about that like you should bring it up and I don't want to lose the I don't want to lose the thought about you know what you see kind of coming down the pipe for uses for sure that's that's easy yeah but but what I mean what are the I guess what are the limitations to neural feedback because that's what right and what's the downside yeah well it only works on these gross features um I mean you get a plasticity boost there's good literature showing that even a single session of neurofeedback causes a big boost of plasticity for about 24 hours after recession so you actually get other indirect effects I guess I got um personal trainers and OTS and PTs calling me and saying my client walked in without a cane what are you doing that's so weird I've been working with her for eight years and this is the first day she ever had balance and no cane oh cool I wasn't working on the balance it's working her anxiety in her sleep yeah but the plasticity was so high hide the PT got in finally and landed and suddenly her balance was better is what happened in that in that example so when you work the brain out you can't really just work out one thing so you do get a global effect but the resources I go after are sleep stress attention and speed those underpin many many things so executive function any flavor of it any flavor of ADHD pretty much you can spot on a brain map most flavors of anxiety and by the way the amygdala has no eight has no EEG can't see it yeah yeah that's why right yeah the amygdala is not about the trauma response it's about the learning of the adverse experience the trauma response is about the posterior cingulate watch the road heads up heads up danger Will Robinson you know or below it the peria periaqueductal gray when you slam your thumb with a hammer the moment of uh relief you get after the pain goes away that's The Dumping of encephalons and endorphins into your central nervous system by the pag it feels coming from emotional stuff I remember the term pag but the periactodactyl gray pH you lost me on that one I was like okay about the gray gray tissue that's it's around the cerebral aqueduct in the middle of the brain and it dumps morphines you know natural endorphins into your system if you have extreme physical pain like you hit your thumb with a hammer or cut something off and I I was taught that growing up and this is how it all works and then recently um sieber and Fisher who's a great psychologist who works in trauma dug into some Imaging data and discovered that pag becomes pre-alerted for adverse experiences throughout life and is actually the thing that drives Developmental and attachment trauma cptsd since it's before the posterior cingulate walked the road one level before that is a little voice going you were traumatized a while ago don't forget it don't forget it that's the PHD it reminds you that you might think might go wrong it's not the threat itself but it's the thing that's shaming you for missing the threat once before a long time ago yeah that sounds like a part of your brain that you both love and hate you need it you don't want to be tranquilized no no it saves your ass but it also like you know gives you some lots of problems later yeah so well the cost of missing dangerous so high that we're biased to latch on to that negativity you know you can miss pleasurable things all day long but miss a tiger once and it might be game over yeah right yeah I like that every single dang time and uh so I think that's a good enough uh reason to talk about the the performance stuff and like why would somebody want us because we talked about you know ADHD we also talked about anxiety yeah that's a clinicals some of that's performance well-being and what's coming down yeah yeah but either way you might want to change your impulsivity or your stamina or your sustain Focus or your vigilance or your depth of sleep or your speed of your speed of processing which is retrieval of words and information flowing your mind those are things you can see and measure and here's the big trick in neurofeedback we can't understand our brain really well it's this population level you know modeling game but if we see something we can change it so hey is this oh this is important to you okay cool Sorry experiencing that oh that might this might be fun to work on let's see what happens so it ends up becoming it's sort of mysterious but not blind the process of neurofeedback because you're like oh this is weird wait a minute huh I feel something that's kind of cool so you know pretty approachable in that particular way executive function is a big driver I don't care if you have ADHD and yourself a kid who's not able to you know do their homework or you're a high level CEO who's making billions we all have executive function that's variable across the day and the time and many of us especially high performance individuals and people that are suffering with the deficits will have difficulties in executive function regulation sleep accumulated you know stress or wear and tear or a lot of my high performing you know athletes or Executives or musician types they've all got like you know maybe acquired problems from their jobs so to speak you know the actor has social anxiety it gets triggered when she's doing Red Carpet speeches but not when doing you know when learning lines or if actors come in because they are getting too old and too drunk to remember their lines and you work their brains out and clean it all up and now they're winning their improv classes and off book one read again after a few months so the point a little bit of the point is it doesn't matter what the diagnostic label is what really matters is what your goals are and goals executive function sleep onset sleep maintenance speed of processing improving and most of the anxiety stuff the selection of the stress versus attention control stuff it's pretty tractable so it becomes more like well here's your brain what do you want to do you know and even before you make a change if I show you stuff I show your interior cingulate being obsessive your posterior singular having a trauma response your right Tempo parietal Junction being a little sensitive to the Social and sensory information coming in if I show it to you and say is this something you deal with you're like oh my gosh yes I do experience that well there it is it's just your brain great oh it's annoying that you've some suffering oh it's annoying but it's just your brain and and even before you do anything it has this this impact of people going oh oh yeah I'm annoyed at that and it can hurt there can be a lot of suffering they can be frustrated but being ashamed of it or feeling guilty of it starts to suddenly drop away and feeling out of control of it starts to drop away even when it's really intrusive stuff oh yeah yeah I am kind of hyper focused and most of the anxiety flavor stuff and the ADHD stuff is also not disease process when it's dysregulated it's an existing natural resource and kind of strong and stuck in one of its modes so between that natural education of here's how your brain works and externalizing it as a thing that's actually happening not a thing you're doing voluntarily this starts to flip people's relationship into something where they're not afraid of their brain they understand it better and they can progressively move through changes and yet neurofeedback's one of those things but so is you know learning how your sleep hacking works and learning how your acetone and ketones work in your bloodstream and playing with some of these metrics so you can steer the system yeah I think but um well I guess one thing is like what do you think the what's the ad what's the downside right yeah with doing this for people the downside of neurofeedback um it it's manageable but the downsides are that if you do the wrong thing it doesn't land the right way so if you train your brain the wrong way uh it won't feel like anything right away it doesn't neurophyback takes a couple sessions to kick in but if you train somebody let's say who's threat sensitive and kind of ruminating to be really really focused you're likely to drive up that sense of anxiety for instance it's transient it happens for half an hour an hour and a half like kind of subtle in the background like wait a minute I kind of feel something wait huh and it wears off or maybe your sleep that night's kind of screwed up you can't fall asleep very easily you wake up a lot you dream more or something and you go huh I don't think I like that protocol yesterday it might have felt a little bit weird okay back off you adjust you look at the brain Maps figure out why and you get a different effect the next time after adjusting the problems in nerfview.com when you ignore the side effect oh this must be good for me I'm going to keep going and you make the side effect itself stronger and stronger and stronger and then permanent or when the system you've been given to train your brain is one of these one size fits all systems where the software is magical and it does all the adjusting those systems are weak tea at best and actually cause a fair amount of is that a future that could get building up negative problems with a better technology better mapping better protocols better well I mean we don't I've seen thousands and thousands of clients I can count on one hand the number of clients that I couldn't actually move in the right direction let alone create adverse I mean every client has a little bit of like oh I felt kind of wired after that or kind of tired after that protocol and that's going to the gym you feel a little bit but the difference between being like well I dropped eggs in the floor at the supermarket because my arms noodles and like there's pain and there's damage and I can't you know function the next day and we work with our clients daily to make sure they're sleep they're stressed their mood their attention the subjective impact is what it should be so we don't like get them train themselves off in the wrong direction and producing Progressive problems that's the risk of neurofeedback is the progressive iteration into the wrong direction but almost any form of neurofeedback is fairly gentle there are some forms that operate a little faster but even those take three four five ten sessions to create change so the rule of thumb becomes don't do the thing again that felt weird and make sure you communicate with the person who's helping you guide what you're doing and there's a very good chance the way in which you felt weird isn't only not a big deal because it wears off but it's useful oh you slept less well after this left side beta oh okay let's try half a herd slower then because you're clearly built a little differently and the next day you get a different effect so because it's not permanent right away you have this freedom to sort of iterate and gently move ahead and validate the effects you're getting before you really get to that permanent place and then we map the brain every other month so we're actually going back to the science and tracking the the more high level data uh to make sure we understand what we're doing and between that we're asking our clients every day you know how's your sleep how's your day how's your stress how's your mood how's drinking how's your anger at your mother-in-law and uh we just learned the variability of them and when one day when they're you know how about a discontinuous response we're like oh yeah that's not typical for him awesome sleep yay or he's in a bad mood he's never in a bad mood maybe we're pushing a little bit hard let's see what what his last protocol was and change it maybe so as long as you do that piece of it you're working with somebody who's got this iterative and you know listening to you kind of piece of it going on then I think that people don't get like the wrong effects and the worst that will happen is it takes longer because your brain's really weird or unusual can take a long time for a few people here and there but neurofeedback against the other forms of change people experience when I say things like a long time it's only some of these you know hard to work on phenomenal or hard to work on brains most things in neurofeedback change dramatically faster than traditional medication I mean an executive function stuff ADHD type phenomena we tend to get a full standard deviation every other month of change and people do three months of neurofeedback about 40 sessions three times a week and they make two or three standard deviations of change and it's just there now and you can come back six months later and there's a good literature in ADHD on six months 12 months five years and ten years even showing good stability so since we provide the access to the data to our clients without charge they double down and engage with this agency perspective and go back and do more brain mapping and meditate a lot and engage with secondary healthy habits which is kind of our trick is to you know now they they're well stabilized to toss other stuff uh your your practitioner and from the person coming to you from help for help yeah the the client needs to both have some sense of what their goals are yeah and they need to be reflecting back especially the day after every session if we are muck or poloing our way towards their goals or not if they're eliciting subjective experiences of any sort it's not no it's hard actually for some folks yeah so I so other so ADHD executive functioning performance seizures I'm not a medical person but the feel has a huge amount of seizure impact it was discovered because of epilepsy because of seizures but the average uh Sturman did a review article in 2012 or 14 showing the average amount of impact on seizures is a reduction of 50 percent and I've never seen a result as poor as 50 percent always seen more than that it's always fairly dramatic just ramping down people's seizure activity migraines same kind of things ramp it down over time using vascular trainings infrared tools and measure blood flow in the brain as as heat surges around I forget Eddie did we use heg Breeze blood flow tools that Alternatives back when you were there yeah oh yeah okay we throw we throw a headset on Eddie and give him uh infrared sensor that measures waves of heat flowing off the brain you concentrate or think happy thoughts and that vascular tone starts to climb and migraines go away and brain fog it's broken up and I don't know why we get better social function in Asperger's and autism as well from frontal training of that blood flow so but again I'm not trying to treat the autism or treat the migraine I'm trying to help someone understand how their brain works and you know take control themselves ultimately but uh there's a lot we can do so are there that come to you with either specific goals or um well patients who come to you that are that are not good candidates or examples where you're sure um I can't say that I have always known who those people were when I was younger in practice and I've also often been practicing in a landscape where I've had a psychologist as part of the team or nearby and so some some people for whom it would have been extra hard to just do nerve feedback I had other resources but you know the past three years I've had at least two people was uh skit to Tipple schizophrenia form you know intrusive stuff yeah and they would not see traditional psych and they had exhausted that in their you know after 30 40 50 years of it and they were fairly disorganized but they were going to come in three times a week and train their brain and they did not make the like amazing linear change most of us make but they made changes took what twice as long both these guys but you know suddenly I'm like wait a minute that email that came in from and had grammar he capitalized wait hey how's this guy doing he came and showered nice you know and it was someone who said I have a lot of anxiety and I find my creativity is too high and I imagine things and I would like to get control of my mind and so he would give us these like really rambling reports every morning of his sleep and how much food he didn't digest and you know really flight of ideas stuff and gradually saw that language get more and more organized you know we just helped him learn his brain so you know it's kind of kind of a fun thing but uh the people who I would say that it's not a good fit for are folks for whom it's not a it's not a there's no physiological component to their complaint first of all um or I do have colleagues that work very very successfully with this population but I find because I don't do therapy I'm not a therapist I'm I'm a trainer I'm a coach and an educator for folks that the whole it's called acts it's called access to end of diagnosis is very difficult these are the relational things narcissism [Music] yeah all the difficulty of like injured relational stuff that has created different ways of interacting with the world neurofeedback can do a lot there actually but it should do a lot in the context of the therapeutic thing you may need because that's a very complicated uh thing that is the psychology of that is at least as in as involved as the physiology learning involved but most flavors of anxiety that is not true you could have profound Tourette's or a tick or hand washing OCD or intrusive thoughts where you're hallucinating just your brain train the brain change the phenomena but you know yeah one of one of my like one of what I've kind of always saw is when I thought about neurofeedback is there's significant barrier to this um is around location and accessibility and and so that like if in what you know when I think of neurofeedback you got to be in a big city um and have a university nearby talk to me about that like where are we at in the world in accessibility for patients it's it's mixed you know when I got involved in the field more than 20 years ago there were a good solid five to eight thousand practitioners in the US and I think there's fewer now because the field has been aging out because it's this very complicated kind of black art for a lot of the way it's taught and apprenticeships are taught and you know also on the same token the other the access is improving and the technology and the approachability of stuff so when I first got involved in the field we needed two separate computers connected by a parallel cable and two monitors and you couldn't use one computer it wasn't enough processing power you know and this wasn't like this was this was like in the 90s it wasn't that long ago that I was doing yeah yeah right which uh we we like to talk uh at least I do which kind of Pearl Jam album are we talking here time frame are we talking oh this is pre-project what was it no it wasn't actually no no it was post Pearl Jam yeah yeah yeah so yeah we're talking 92 2 is 10. yeah this would have been in 94 that I was I'm talking about so I was first they were they were not that exciting anymore they were kind of old hat they were like oh hey mainstream by then still exciting to this day man like I just don't but they were mainstream by the mid 90s they were no longer like what's programming you know what I'm saying okay it does yeah exactly do you want Andrew it's a really nice Jam yeah side note uh Ed and I were at a um at a retreat center together like we were doing a company Retreat and we went into this spa and somebody asked like basically and if he was here with his dad and me oh I was his dad nice nice give it a mustache I can see it I can see it yeah yeah yeah just because you have a mustache doesn't mean you have a like you know uh well here we were talking about Precision medicine and yeah yeah so funny um so I guess the so access sorry we're focused on access like where is that so so again the the field has been shrinking a little bit because it's a knowledge-based area that does take a few years of learning for many of the practitioners and yet we're also getting fitness trackers and sleep trackers and I mean the cost of Gear is one of the amps that I send people home with this is less than a grand now for training you know for EEG systems um so the cost of hardware and software and everything else is coming down the knowledge cost is is still been in a little bit of a siled place in many of the uh ways people would like to get access so Peak brain my company has offices in several cities and you can go to our office physically but about 80 of our clients never see our offices we send gear to you we map your brain from home we teach you how to stick wires to your head and run software and we have coaches who run with you seven days a week and teach you things and nudge you to do your stuff and fill out your sleep surveys and you're doing this remotely we're doing traditional nerve feedback not one size fits all we aren't selling you a kit that self-runs we're doing neurophy back with you tracking progress touching base with you but teaching you to become your own like you know biohacker stick wires to your head or your kid's head and then check in with us for wire placement or for effects and and learn to move through it themselves yeah so oh that's I mean that's wherever you like to be in the world if you wish but do you feel like have you been and maybe you've been tracking this or not but do you feel like you have same results in people doing this on their own versus people doing it in person like what is that I in my mind sure in person seems like a better deal you know like you know don't tell my clients in the office this but clients who work from home get better results oh yeah let's unpack that buddy there's a few things there one in my offices it's three times a week at home you got the gear you got the brain you got the goals you want to crank it up okay let's crank it up and try some more stuff and do another session here and there so instead of 40 sessions it's 50 over three months that is a big difference in dosing actually that's one reason two if you're learning sticker wires your head learning a protocol observing your sleep you're doing it at home yourself and structuring your own workout plan and logging your own experiences the way you engage with it's a little bit different than coming in and being asked if you slapped or if you're focused today and sitting down having tea while something's done to you quote unquote so the agency and the education piece is so much deeper when you're self training yeah lean into it more and try more stuff and you get more out of it and you do more neurofeedback and it costs the same as our office space programs based on the number of months so this is why 80 of our clients are doing it from home because they have the control over it and the ones that like technology is confusing or their kid is won't do what they tell them to they come in you know but most of our clients just say hey that protocol was great can I do another one like that today oh yeah yeah let's try this one for you today and then they go and they do that in our feedback and they talk to us later do you have patients that originally show up at an office and then transition to like yeah yep we do um we have offices in New York City LA Orange County California and St Louis no Denver we actually have a lot of a lot of clients in Denver an awful lot actually but they're all working from home directly and you know we're also opening up right now in London in Stockholm and we have some Partners in other places like Wellington and Sydney and other you know we're pretty far flung but most of our clients will you know again start remotely those that are near one of the offices will often be like get the brain map done but I have plenty of clients that just come into the office for mapping and train from home still because they live in LA you can't get across town sometimes yeah so you know we'll be in Denver yeah right right they they live 12 miles away it's a two-hour drive you know perhaps so it's a long time of day um so I do have clients do both and often clients are concerned about the complexity of oh I'm not sure I can handle this I'm gonna do it in the office and then like we could we could twin they're like oh hey can I uh get a kitten this from home this is pretty cool I can do this yeah and then we'd teach you we spend the first two weeks at least live stick and wires double checking signals teaching you the basics I joke that folks who go through our three-month programs for their own self-training they are more skilled than Junior Texar at EEG centers yeah you know signals they can run data they then you know like they can troubleshoot 60 hertz noise because their friend has the air conditioner on the next room you know so it's it's uh it's a skill set we give them so they get deeper into it and they they tend to get more out of it when they do that yeah so all right so what so last question is all right what's what's on the horizon what's what's coming what's coming down yeah so ultimately I mean we're really focused on this access and agency play right so I alluded to the fact that earlier earlier I mentioned that most providers are therapists and that's wonderful I think it's a really really good need for therapy and neurofeedback as a blend even with the same practitioner I love that especially for things like you know deeply psychological stuff like borderline or narcissism or ocpd or something but I also think that because of the brain drain and the people aging out of the field it's even in New York City if you wanted to go to a regular provider it's like three to four hundred bucks a session now in La same thing in St Louis it's like 200 bucks a session because they're therapists doing one-on-one work and there's less access to it now than there was before so we've taken the thing on remote our fees are dramatically lower than that at a where we're under the hundred dollars an hour a session rate usually um and we want to take that further and move the sort of coaching piece of it into uh software you know fitness trackers for the brain so we can be coaching and we actually built to Cobble together one that all of our clients use where they they log their sleep they're stressed their mood their attention they're drinking their anger whatever they're working on and we see it fluctuate day to day and we reflect back to them hey we see this thank you for letting us know try this is that that's the coaching loop I call it the rra cycle in-house the reflect review and act cycle there's something client's perspective reflecting their experience back to them what's going on after you've reviewed their experience provide an action or an intervention start all over again that's the coaching cycle we use and I think that piece of it's great but I also think that my phone knows you know how many carbs I had today because I track it my fitness tracker it knows how much sleep I got last night because my ordering told it ultimately we're going to place I think of intelligent agents doing personalized not just personalized predictions but like avatars I think we're gonna have little you know Ed's going to have a small ad on the phone that he's going to say hey hey virtual Ed how would this med treat me and the virtual Ed will say oh based on genetics and experience and this that this this med is not good for you because of these reasons that's I think that's the personalized medicine value with massive data Ai and I've been thinking this for years but now I think it's probably going to happen like tomorrow instead of in 10 years or 20 years yeah it feels that way now I mean I was probably teaching some you know some of these like transformation technology coming you know in in our classes 10 years ago I guess that some of this was a hint but now we're hurtling towards yeah Dynamic technology that's going to react to our needs in a way that I mean you know I I have the UCLA health system with my doctors I have a really bad experience over the past six months seeing a doctor who's like just not interested in in listening to me or asking questions or hearing about a diagnosis just not interested because it's not in their area of expertise or they don't think it is or whatever best health one of the Better Health Care Systems in the world roundly underwhelmed by them roundly and what I you know what they really need is not just like a dashboard of all my test results they need like a little tiny you know intelligent Avatar that can like start collecting things and making associations and giving people coaching hey your sleep's doing that try this and surfacing you know stuff for them things I imagine wild health does at the coaching level for a lot of their clients it's the sort of intermediate piece of here's the doctor's recommendations but here's the here's the ways I'm going to talk to you about getting that stuff done you know the coaching aspects yeah and bring it in in technology has definitely been part of what we're bringing in there and and more so that's Ed's job but um but I one of the questions I had was is does this do people ever and you can be like yeah that doesn't make any sense uh but partner with like EMDR therapists oh sure absolutely brain spotting would be another one we just did a podcast on brain spotting um that that people are looking at at your neural feedback data around that I mean like all the time all the time both the MDR and brain spotting and somatic experiencing therapists and they all they send people to us all the time for two reasons one some people get kind of activated through brain spotting or EMDR and they're kind of it's a hard process for someone it's not all it's like exposure therapy for OCD it's not always enjoyable right afterwards you're kind of not super well regulated so for those people they go to EMDR come to neural feedback into a state shift back down to ground more common folks aren't getting what they want they're getting the shifts listen there's something in their way let's see do you know our feedback and send them to the MDR and they have breakthrough experiences and that's just the plasticity thing generally but you can also do what's called Alpha Theta neurofeedback which is reliable access to non-linear hypnagogic access Consciousness stuff so like I do this for CEOs you know high-powered linear guys and their wives call me whatever you did do it again I got we had the best therapy session ever I don't care what it was do it again hit the repeat button on that yeah oh my God I was so sensitive I was a good listener oh my gosh I love that do it again yeah I mean I mean I guess the next natural when you if you're talking about mental health in the mental health space right now the next natural question is are people pairing this with psychedelics um they are a little bit um I'm a little bit under impressed with psychedelics I think there's two cases where psychedelics are being used by and I work with a lot of like high level biohackers so I see a lot of like people experimenting on themselves and I do brain maps and some people on requests and I have a pretty informed perspective on this but I think psychedelics have a couple problems um one I think there's very little evidence that humans can have an altar State of Consciousness and come back to ordinary reality with any harvest the ordeals are ordeals and they create shifts and they break you free of your shape we're not really good at extracting Insight back to our normal reality it doesn't work very well with the heroic doses of psychedelics the micro doses the low-key irritation of plasticity that people are getting into great but there's lots of ways to crank up plasticity to 11. Lots and I think most of them are more reliable more reproducible and less of a dump in dynamite in the kiddie pool for the occasional person the way a psychedelic could be well I guess what I was that that that's a super interesting perspective that I haven't heard before but I my thought process was actually people micro dosing and doing neurofeedback right or and they do they do but it doesn't really create more change than neural feedback alone okay okay um Hyperbaric Medicine by itself creates very small changes in the brain but if you add it to neurofeedback you double the impact of neurofeedback but you have to be careful with the order you have to dive last or you cause problems when you mix them and there's many other interventions like that where they actually stack neurofeedback increases the impact of almost anything you do dramatically and a few things lubricating or feedback like like hbot will lubricate neurofeedback pretty nicely well Dr Hill uh uh I I feel like I'm gonna have to you and I are gonna have to unpack a bunch of other stuff we're we're we're coming up on an hour um uh Ed sorry if I I uh interrupt or talked over you at all there but you have do you have any other questions before we go that stuff that we want to talk on no no Daddy you guys want to reminisce a little more or something um yeah that's right that's right okay no you're awesome um no so but I don't know that was awesome really nice talk to you uh I think we should plan on having you back and I um we'll unpack some other stuff there because that there's a there's kind of a lot here I think also you know other stuff talking about like kids in ADHD treatment and and and and also Sports Performance and post-concussive discussions like there's a lot there but let's let's one little hint there is that post-concussion brains and post-covered brains and post lime or mold or chemotherapy brains all look really really really similar on an EEG uh yeah again we're gonna have we have a lot we have a lot to impact there that's that's not uh it's not a yeah just to mess with me a little just do it all right well hey it's really yeah it was really nice talking with you I really appreciate it you as well doc you as well nice to see you again Ed thanks so much for listening to the wild Health podcast if you want more daily health education be sure to follow us on Instagram which is filled with health optimization how to's grocery shopping lists guided breath work posts myth debunking and so much more you can find us at wildhealthmd on Instagram